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Our little school in Michigan doesn’t have an art class.  Every spring I get funding through the PTA to put on an art program for the entire school.  I work with our awesome teachers coming up with ideas or helping them purchase supplies for their own ideas.  This year each teacher chose an artist to teach their students about, and then they completed a project.  They either create their own project following a particular style OR they re-create a project from that artist.  Each class is a little different in what they do.

This year I did the planning for two grades- this post is about the first grade project studying Eric Carle.  I got the idea (I think) from pinterest and then did my own version.

I purchased the book about seahorses by Eric Carle from Amazon:

Mister Seahorse: board book (World of Eric Carle) (AMAZON)

The link takes you to the board book but then you have the option of hardcover and paperback.  I bought the hardcover version for the teacher to keep for future years.  It’s larger so she could show the photos to the entire class instead of using a smaller board book.

Thanks to generous funding from our PTA, I was able to purchase 8×10 canvases (Michaels had tons of sales where you could get a pack of 10 for $13 and then I had a 20% off total purchase coupon… so I got a really good deal.  I needed 27 for this class.

I used my cricut (electronic die cutting machine)Cricut Explore Air Wireless Cutting Machine  to cut 27 seahorses from watercolor paper.  I kept all of the scrap water color paper and took it to the school with me.

PROCESS:

The kids used blue, white and black acrylic paint to paint their canvases to look like water.

They used a big foam brush to paint metallic gold paint on bubble wrap- that was used to stamp bubbles onto the water background.  Those were “air bubbles”

At a separate station- the kids water colored the pre-cut seahorses and some of the scrap watercolor paper.

We allowed everything to dry overnight.  The next day the kids cut the scrap paper into strips of seaweed, and glued their seaweed and seahorses onto the canvases with a simple Elmers glue.  Here’s the final product- I think they turned out great!